Winter 2001

Features

Cataclysm, Light, & Passion :: Even though the Washington wine industry is in its relative infancy, it is playing with the big boys. How did it get so good so quickly? by Tim Steury

The Laguna's Secrets :: On the shore of the Laguna Especial, some 30 locals of all ages watch patiently, no doubt mentally rehearsing the crazy gringo stories they'll share tonight over dinner. The archaeologists are the best show on the mountain. by Tim Steury

In search of a tougher honey bee

WASHINGTON STATE apple
growers have a problem. The honey
bees that pollinate their trees can
be a little wimpy when it comes to
temperature.

Apple growers prefer to have the
king, or primary, blooms pollinated,
because they produce the
biggest apples. But all too often, the
trees bloom during cool weather.
And the resident honey bees, being
mostly of Italian descent and therefore
partial to Mediterranean
weather, hole up when the temperature
dips below 55 degrees F.

Other bees do better in cool
weather but often have quirks of
their own that limit their usefulness
as pollinators.

So Steve Sheppard—associate
professor of entomology at Washington
State University and holder
of the Thurber Chair—went looking
for a hardier bee. In Kazakhstan,
no less. After all, says Sheppard, it
was in the mountains of Kazakhstan
that apples evolved. And it’s
cold there.

Besides, Sheppard also has a
scholarly interest in Kazakh bees. It
was about a million years ago,
according to the conventional
wisdom, that two species of honey
bee—Apis mellifera, familiar in the
Western hemisphere, and Apis cerana—
diverged from a common
ancestor. Sheppard thinks the
divergence took place eight million
years before that. He believes A.
mellifera evolved from an as yet
unknown species. And he thinks
this missing link might be in—you
guessed it—Kazakhstan.

Sheppard did find a subspecies of
bee in Kazakhstan that might just
work as a cool-weather
pollinator, if not a
missing link. This
coming April he’ll
return to Kazakhstan
and attempt to
retrieve some queen
bees to bring into the
United States.